‘You understand that?’ barked Grendel.
‘Not even a little bit,’ said Honsou.
The substance of Votheer Tark’s answer was made plain moments later, as a trio of the champion’s battle-engines dragged their bulk upwards. Two were heavily-armoured vehicles with multiple guns on a rear-set turret, and spiked tracks that clawed the rubble as they slowly made their way uphill. The third was a monstrous mechanical hybrid of a scorpion and centaur. Its multiple legs rapidly hauled its heavy, segmented bulk uphill in sinuous sweeps, a brass, skull-rimmed cannon in its chest spitting gobbets of electrical fire.
Honsou ducked as the mecha-organic beast stomped past him, the impacts of its heavy treads sending yet more rubble skittering downhill. A bolt of blue lightning arced from its chest gun to the summit of the breach, and a dozen mortal soldiers were burned to cinders where they stood, their suits erupting in oxygen-rich flames before swiftly snuffing out. One of the Ultramarines dropped to his knees, his armour burned and hissing oxygen where the seals had burst.
The Dreadnought rocked back, liquid lightning dancing across its granite sarcophagus and crackling hammer arm. Its cannon streamed a thundering blizzard of shells that tore across the battle-engine’s flanks, blasting off armour plates and chewing up the mechanised flesh beneath. Pale liquid, like the blood of some giant insect, sprayed and the monster howled in agony, but it kept going.
Tark’s vehicles didn’t fire, the angle too steep for their main guns to be brought to bear. Unstoppable and indestructible, the heavy tanks crunched upwards behind the rapidly-climbing scorpion beast. They would roll over any opposition, and Honsou wished he had a hundred more like them.
Another underground blast rocked the slope of the breach as the scorpion machine clawed its way onto the top of the breach. Its red flesh pulsed in battle fury, the sparking conduits that slithered around its underbelly glowing with wychfires. The battle-engine’s giant pincer arms snapped at the Dreadnought, tearing off an eagle-stamped sheet of adamantium and ceramite. Sparks and flames erupted from the wound, but the Dreadnought simply stepped in closer to its attacker and brought its hammer down with crushing force on the scorpion creature’s head.
Driven by hate as much as mechanical, fibre-bundle muscles, the energised hammer slammed into the scorpion beast’s body with seismic force, obliterating its mechanised skull and exploding its chest in a welter of artificial blood and machine parts. The battle-engine died with a deafening shriek of scrapcode that sliced through Honsou’s skull like a laser drill.
He cried out and dropped his weapon, his hands unconsciously flying to the sides of his skull as if to better block the sound. Grendel too, jerked in pain, but Notha Etassay leapt to his feet, jerking like an electrocution victim, and Honsou could hear his moans of ecstatic pleasure over the scorpion beast’s death scream.
Blinking away the aftermath of the agonising spike of pain, Honsou felt the ground lurch beneath him, as though the slope had suddenly and horribly shifted. With a cold jolt of realisation he suddenly understood why the Imperials were using their mobile artillery pieces in such an unorthodox manner.
‘Iron Warriors!’ he shouted, as the rocks beneath him began grinding together and he felt a monstrously powerful vibration work its way up from somewhere far below. ‘Everyone get back! Get down now!’
He scrambled to his feet and began skidding and sliding down the slope of the breach. Warriors who had been, moments before, fighting to reach the top of the breach, milled in confusion.
Etassay’s voice sounded in his ear. ‘Retreat? Are you mad? This is too good to stop now!’
‘Move now or you’re going to die!’ snarled Honsou, risking a glance over his shoulder in time to see the blackened and scarred Dreadnought raise its hammer once more and strike a mighty blow against the rubble at the top of the breach.
It was all the force needed to complete the work begun by the subterranean blasts.
With a tortured vibration of cracked and broken stone, the entire slope of rubble slid away from the walls, its previously stable condition of tightly packed debris undone by the defenders. Enormous sections of the slope simply collapsed like sinkholes, dragging scores of warriors to their doom, while others were swept away in devastating avalanches of rock. Tark’s battle-engines, so close to the breach, fell into the deep chasm that opened up between the rubble slope and the wall. Thousands of tonnes of rock and steel collapsed in a crashing flow of debris that crushed men and machines, burying them forever beneath a sea of stone.
Honsou ran for his life, fighting to keep his feet on a juddering carpet of uneven ground. Shattered chunks of the walls bounced past him, crushing anything in their path. A rebar of orange steel slashed downwards to impale the Iron Warrior running alongside him. The spinning head of an Ultramarines statue slid past him, the enigmatic smile on its alabaster face seeming to mock his attempts to stay alive.
He heard panicked cries echoing in his helmet, but cared nothing for the men dying around him. All that mattered was his own life. The ground heaved, an animal desperate to hurl him from its back, and he felt his balance failing.
A flying rock struck the side of his helmet with dizzying force and he fell, tumbling end over end down the avalanche, carried as helpless as an insect in a surging river.
Rocks, steel and bodies pummelled him as he fell, the world spinning around him and disintegrating into an impenetrable mass of light and sound and pain.
FIVE
High in the shadowed roof beams of a metal fabrik in the eastern reaches of the Via Rex, Ardaric Vaanes leaned against a heavy iron stanchion. His helmet sat before him on the wide girder, and he took a deep breath of air. It tasted of metal shavings and the warm, animal reek of the loxatl, but the chance to remove his helmet was too good to pass up. This deep in the star fort, atmospheric integrity had not been compromised and even the stale taste of recycled air was like a refreshing mountain breeze in his lungs.
Far below, huge piles of refined metal covered vast areas of the floor between the dormant forges and idle milling machines. Further along the girder, the Newborn watched the surviving loxatl with rapt attention. The lizard-like beasts clung to the iron girders, as dormant as the machinery below, and their chameleon-like skin rippled through shades of darkness as the light changed.
While Honsou and his Iron Warriors laid siege to the Gauntlet Bastions, Vaanes, the Newborn and the loxatl had taken the fight to the Imperials in a shadow war behind the front lines. Day and night, they sabotaged communication nodes, blew power relays, generators and void arrays. With looted weapons and explosives they set improvised traps that claimed the lives of hundreds of enemy soldiers.
Supply trains, repair crews and isolated patrols were ambushed and killed, and now the Imperials never travelled without an escort of heavily armoured vehicles. Hundreds of men had been drawn from the front lines to guard vital locations, and Vaanes could almost taste their fear in the air. Something in the dark was hunting them, and the terror of that unseen foe was scraping at their nerves like a rusty blade.
Realising the enemy had infiltrated their rear echelons, the Imperials sent scout patrols to seek them out, tough soldiers schooled in working behind the lines. They were good, the best of their regiment no doubt, but their prey was a hunter trained since birth to be like a shadow himself. Ardaric Vaanes had been Raven Guard, a warrior first and foremost, but haunting the shadows, striking from ambush and killing in the darkness, he was in his element, and there were no finer hunters of men than the scions of Corax.
He glanced at the bare plates of his shoulder guards. Once they had proudly borne the heraldry of the Raven Guard, a winged white hunting bird. A moment of madness had seen that symbol’s meaning and identity stripped from him, and strange circumstance had forced him to adopt a new symbol, that of the renegade; the jagged red cross of the Red Corsairs.
Now, even that was gone and the stained, featureless metal was a perfect reflection of his soul. He was a warrior wit
hout a Chapter, a killer without a code and a man who saw a great abyss before him.
A great abyss into which he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already fallen.
Looking at the shoulder guard, he wondered if, one day, there might be a symbol of which he could be proud emblazoned upon it. Was there yet hope for redemption? Or was this yet another sign that he was slowly becoming less than nothing, simply malleable clay that monstrous powers were moulding into something terrible?
‘They never speak,’ said the Newborn, breaking Vaanes’s train of thought and startling him from his gloomy reverie. ‘Why do you suppose that is?’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Vaanes. ‘Who never speaks?’
‘The loxatl. They don’t speak, at least not that I can see.’
‘They speak,’ replied Vaanes. ‘Just not the way we do.’
‘How do they speak?’
‘I’m told it’s through the patterning of their skin, but I don’t know for sure.’
‘Are they talking right now?’
Vaanes sighed. At times the Newborn’s curiosity was refreshing, at others, irritating. This was one of the latter.
‘Maybe,’ he said, seeing a grimace of pain cross the Newborn’s face. ‘Does it matter? Anyway, you should get some rest. We’ve been on active operations behind enemy lines for a long time now. We need to refresh ourselves or we’ll start to get careless.’
‘I am refreshed,’ said the Newborn, a faint light oozing between the stitching of its patchwork features. ‘The presence of the chained daemon lord nourishes me, fills my limbs with strength. I am stronger than ever.’
‘You can feel it?’ said Vaanes, interested, despite himself.
The Newborn nodded. ‘I can. The Master of the Ultramarines had his allies bind it within the warp core of the star fort. The very energies that sustain it also imprison it, and the more it struggles against its bindings, the tighter they pull.’
‘Clever.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the Newborn. ‘Marneus Calgar is a great man: strong, proud and honourable. I would very much like to meet him.’
Vaanes chuckled. ‘That’s Ventris talking,’ he said. ‘You’re admiring a man you’ve never met, a man who would kill you on sight if you ever did.’
‘Why would he kill me?’ asked the Newborn angrily, its mood changing from inquisitive to hostile in a heartbeat. ‘I bear the gene-seed of the Ultramarines.’
‘Don’t let Honsou hear you say that,’ advised Vaanes. ‘He’ll kill you himself for saying that. He’s obsessed with destroying all trace of the Ultramarines.’
‘Yes, I suppose he is. Honsou and Grendel both.’
‘I think Grendel would be happy to kill anyone, doesn’t matter if they’re Ultramarines or not. The man’s a killer, pure and simple.’
‘Like me,’ said the Newborn sadly. ‘Like you.’
‘No,’ said Vaanes, picturing a needle-like spire on a darkened world on the far side of the galaxy he had once called home. ‘Not like me at all.’
The mood in Honsou’s bunker was strained, the defeat at the breach having soured everyone’s enthusiasm for the siege. Only Cadaras Grendel seemed energised, pacing the interior of the bunker like a caged predator.
Honsou looked through the integrity field built into the bunker’s vision ports at the scarred face of the Gauntlet Bastions. Both arrowhead redoubts had suffered horrendous damage, but they were still standing and they were still in enemy hands. A great spread of rubble carpeted the ground before the V-shaped gouge torn in the left bastion.
He turned away from the dispiriting view and returned to a set of plans he’d sketched out an hour before, architectural plans of the battlefield that would have put a calculus logi to shame with their accuracy and technical detail.
Notha Etassay, resplendent in a fresh bodysuit of lacquered black and silver, glanced at the drawings with disinterest, while Grendel simply studied them for a moment before jabbing a finger down and saying, ‘What are you waiting for? Begin the barrage again!’
Etassay sighed. ‘Must we endure yet more tedium as you break your way into the other bastion?’
‘Don’t be a fool, Etassay,’ hissed Grendel. ‘We simply batter another slope through the damaged wall. Go back in the same way.’
‘How unimaginative,’ said Etassay. ‘And entirely predictable.’
‘I’ll show you predictable,’ hissed Grendel, balling his fists and reaching for his blade.
Before his knife was an inch from its scabbard, Etassay’s shimmering energy rapier was at his throat.
‘So predictable,’ said Etassay with an insouciant smile.
‘Enough, the pair of you,’ growled Honsou. ‘I’m trying to think.’
Grendel released his grip on the knife and returned to his pacing, muttering and casting hateful glances at Notha Etassay.
Honsou ignored them both, instead calculating angles of attack, time and distance factors, and defence depth to attack weight ratios. None of the figures his enhanced cognitive processes were coming up with were good enough, and he began to fear that Grendel might be right, that they would have to go back in the same way.
That didn’t sit well with Honsou, for what had failed once would likely fail again.
The attack on the left bastion cost them dearly in terms of time and effort, but little in real worth. Most of the dead were numbered amongst the chaff or alien species he’d swept up in the Skull Harvest. His Iron Warriors, two hundred grim siegemasters of Perturabo, had survived the collapse of the rubble slope, simply digging their way free. Their power armour was proof against mere rocks and rubble, which was more than could be said for the hundreds buried alive or crushed by the rockfall.
‘Can Adept Cycerin do nothing?’ asked Etassay. ‘Can he not order the weapon systems of this fort to shut down, overload the artificial gravity or use some other technical sorcery to aid us?’
‘That’s exactly what he is doing,’ said Honsou, ‘but whatever priest of the machine they have in the Indomitable’s basilica has defeated his every attack.’
‘Then would it not simply be quicker to bring a ship in close and blast the walls with its guns?’ suggested Etassay. ‘It would certainly allow me to sheath my weapon in living flesh before I die of old age.’
‘Do you really think I haven’t thought of that?’ said Honsou. ‘To make sure it didn’t flatten us along with the walls in its bombardment, a ship would need to take up a firing position virtually on top of the bastions.’
‘And?’
‘And the defences of the Basilica would blow it out of the sky,’ explained Honsou, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Torpedoes and multiple batteries would kill any ship that came in close enough for a precision strike.’
‘Maybe it would,’ said Etassay, his feral grin of pleasure widening, ‘but just think where it would land.’
Brother Olantor studied the glowing holo-schematics projected from the plotting table, trying to work out what the enemy’s next move would be. Gathered around the table, Brother Altarion, his armour still black and scarred from the battle with the mechanised scorpion, regarded the data as it flowed across the table, but it was impossible to read what he made of it all.
Interrogator Sibiya and a Saurian lieutenant consulted an encrypted data slate, while Techmarine Hestian sat within the enclosure that had recently been Brother Altarion’s command station. Dozens of wires trailed from the Techmarine’s skull, neck and forearms, trailing across the chapel’s floor to the main cogitator bank. Sweat poured down his face, the muscles and sinews at his neck clenched and taut.
Hestian fought an invisible battle within the consciousness of the machine-spirits of the star fort against a suspected adept of the Dark Mechanicus. Though Hestian did not fight with bolter and chainsword, his fight was no less deadly and no less honourable.
‘So do we have them beaten?’ asked Sibiya, finished with her lieutenant. ‘They must have lost a great many men and machines in the
abortive assault on the walls.’
‘They will have suffered losses, yes, but I wouldn’t count on them being too severe,’ replied Olantor. ‘Many of the traitors will have survived. Power armour can sustain a great deal of damage, and I believe they will come at us again. Most likely at the same bastion, as it’s already breached and they can demolish the remaining portion of the wall quickly enough.’
‘Can we hold the breach?’ asked Sibiya.
Olantor shared a worried glance with Sibiya. ‘Indeed, my lord. I’ve moved up additional termite shells for the Thunderfires, and had seismic charges set into the launchers at the base of the wall. If they blast another ramp to the breach, we’ll blow it down again.’
‘Macragge?’ said Olantor. ‘My lord, this is the Indomitable. Macragge is many light years away.’
Olantor shook his head as he saw Sibiya’s confusion. Not now…
‘As you say, my lord, the fortress must hold,’ he said smoothly. ‘Now, the enemy appear to be consolidating, so while we have some breathing room I want to organise proper hunting parties for these damned infiltrators. We’re haemorrhaging men and supplies from their attacks, and it has to end now. I propose–’
‘Incoming!’ shouted Hestian, his mouth stretched in a rictus of pain. ‘Enemy vessel on approach vector.’
The display on the plotting table flickered as a haze of static washed through it and the display changed to that of the local airspace. Trajectories and orbital tracks flickered and danced, but stark amongst the information was the pulsing icon of the enemy vessel.
‘Archenemy escort… Infidel class,’ cried Hestian, his voice strained and dry. ‘Plasma signatures indicate the vessel has suffered heavy damage.’
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